Awesomeness just happened! My parents (or my father, at least) considered the impending doom of Windows XP, which their desktop computer happens to be infected with (their laptop as well, but let's not get ahead of ourselves). So, having yet another besides me in the social circle who does Linux, he just ordered a USB stick (8 Gb) with Mint 14.1 MATE on it - success! In 7-14 business days Linux will spread ever so little further.

Now, my question(s): What kind of system will they actually get? Is it simply the live system, with all advantages and disadvantages, or is it closer to an installed system? What do I mean by that? Not the foggiest idea, but I was hoping it won't be necessary to go through hardware detection every boot, at least. Will the settings, software changes and user data be persistent on the media?

First, congratulations Hopefully everything will work out of the box, but if it doesn't remind your dad we are here to help!

Anyway, I'm not sure actually how these are shipped. That's up to the distributor. Where did you buy it? I think it is most likely it will be a non-persistent live USB, which you can use to test out Linux Mint fully before installing, to install it to your computer's hard disk, and if later problems arise you can use it for rescue actions. You can also in the future re-use it to install newer Linux Mint versions from.

To test things out; you can install Linux Mint alongside the current Windows XP installation. Once everything is working to satisfaction and everything needed migrated (email archive, browser bookmarks, family photos, documents, and so on), you can then boot again from the Linux Mint USB stick and use the included GParted program to remove Windows XP and add the freed up disk space to Linux Mint.